Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition, Rockstar’s remastered collection of GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas, was a huge commercial success despite being lambasted by critics and players for its litany of bugs, technical issues, and questionable art style.
Speaking during the publisher’s quarterly earnings report, and spotted by PC Gamer, Take-Two chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick said the GTA Trilogy was a significant sales win.
“Rockstar Games celebrated the 20th anniversary of the launch of Grand Theft Auto III with the release of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition for current and prior-gen consoles and PC via the Rockstar Games Launcher, with the title significantly exceeding our commercial expectations,” Zelnick said.
Some clever maths by VGC seems to have revealed just how big a commercial success the GTA Trilogy was. Take-Two’s earnings report shows the entire GTA series has sold 370 million units to date, up from 355 million last November - that’s a 15 million difference.
GTA V accounted for 5 million of those additional sales (the game has now sold 160 million units, up from 155 million last quarter), meaning another game in the GTA series was responsible for the remaining 10 million. With no other major GTA title releasing in the last quarter, it’s likely the GTA Trilogy accounts for the majority of those remaining 10 million sales, give or take a few sales of older GTA games.
The GTA Trilogy isn’t going away, either. The game will release for iOS and Android sometime in the first half of 2022, although, hopefully, with significantly fewer glitches.
Analysis: rubbing players the wrong way
The GTA Trilogy’s high sales figures may come as a surprise in light of its exceedingly poor launch. The game was criticized across the board for its widespread technical issues, graphical glitches, and a radically altered visual style that didn’t so much improve on the originals as it did push them in a totally different direction.
At the peak of player disappointment, Rockstar not only promised to give players the original versions of the games for no additional cost, but also offered them a free pick of another game in their catalog. It later apologized for the state of the trilogy and promised to return the games’ original PC releases to digital storefronts after having removed them to effectively lock players into the remastered versions.
Those concessions haven’t alleviated disappointment with the game nor, it seems, has it convinced Take-Two that the GTA Trilogy was released to substandard quality. In its recent earnings report, it still referred to the GTA trilogy as “featuring across-the-board upgrades for all three games, including graphical improvements and modern controls for all three titles, while still maintaining the classic and distinct aesthetic of the original games” - something few players would agree with.
The inevitable success of the GTA franchise probably shouldn’t come as a shock. With GTA V now sitting at 160 million sales and continuing to sell year-on-year, Rockstar has all but proved that any GTA release will be lapped up by eager fans, even if it’s little more than a shoddy mess.
Now Rockstar has confirmed GTA 6 is in active development, you can be sure that the game will sell just as well as every GTA title that’s come before it.
- Best GTA games: the Grand Theft Auto series ranked
